


a eulogy

by The_Eclectic_Bookworm



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Gen, jenny's not here but i'm tagging her, some very light jenny/giles but like....that's to be expected?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-14
Updated: 2018-08-14
Packaged: 2019-06-27 06:53:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15680262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Eclectic_Bookworm/pseuds/The_Eclectic_Bookworm
Summary: Jenny Calendar, as told by how she is remembered.





	a eulogy

Two items are in the locked drawer of Giles’s filing cabinet: a strip of photos taken at a monster truck rally, and a weathered, well-loved leather jacket. Neither have been touched. The key to the drawer is on his key ring, an innocuous silver one that blends seamlessly with keys for his office, for his home, for his car. Over the course of his Slayer’s senior year, he precisely and painfully forgets exactly what it unlocks.

The library is blown to bits during the Ascension. He throws himself into finding Buffy’s diploma so that he does not have to think about what he has lost.

* * *

 

Willow’s outfits seem childish and not at all fitting for a soon-to-be college student. Thinking about going to school in her fuzzy sweaters and stockings make her stomach hurt; she feels babyish and vulnerable, especially looking at the college students she’s sometimes seen at the mall. She’s eighteen, and wearing a sweater with knitted flowers, and she feels like this is something her mom should be able to help with. Or Buffy, maybe, but Willow doesn’t like admitting that she doesn’t know something; she’s supposed to be the Smart One out of all of them.

On the discount rack, a long skirt makes Willow think, unexpectedly, of Ms. Calendar. Ms. Calendar, with her not-at-all tacky sweaters and her flowy skirts and the easy-bouncy way she held herself that still seemed to say _I’m cool, I’m incredible, I’m sexy._ The _sexy_ bit comes with a strange self-loathing that she won’t understand for a few months to come.

She wavers, then picks up the skirt and looks at it more closely. Imagines herself, a college student, with Ms. Calendar’s effortlessly half-choppy haircut, a gauzy skirt, a flowy top.

This could work. This could work for her.

* * *

 

Buffy doesn’t patrol in the cemetery where Ms. Calendar is buried for four years. It’s only when she has come back from the dead that she enters the cemetery at all, and feels a vague sense of guilt and recognition. She can’t pinpoint the feeling; it’s foreboding, as though she shouldn’t be here, and at the same time ashamed, as though she should have been here a long time ago.

Perhaps it’s that the smaller, more mundane details of her life seem less important when she’s struggling to keep herself alive for the rest of the people around her. (She will feel horrible, later, for calling Ms. Calendar’s death _mundane,_ even for a moment.) But as she wanders the cemetery, she still can’t figure out why she spent such a long time avoiding this place—it’s not as well-known to her as the other cemeteries she usually patrols. (She will learn, later, that it was Giles picking up the slack, and feel even more horrible about forcing him to—to do that, to be faced with that, just because she wasn’t able to get over her own fucking guilt over something that was her own fucking fault.)

She almost trips over Ms. Calendar’s grave. She stares at it, distantly, then says, “I hope you got to heaven too,” in a small, tired voice. She thinks about the yellow floppy disk and—someone who did that, died to save someone else, they wouldn’t go anywhere terrible, Buffy thinks.

* * *

 

Xander thinks about Ms. Calendar about as often as he thinks about Jesse, which is to say, not at all. He doesn’t think about people who have been lost. He looks ahead, because he would lose himself if he thought about everything that’s been lost—every year, another death, and every year he thinks _this time it could end up being one of us._

It already was, once. Ms. Calendar. But then she wasn’t all the way one of them, and neither was Jesse—so he doesn’t let himself think about it.

* * *

 

Cordelia never asks Angel what he would have named Connor, had Connor been a girl. Privately, she thinks to herself, _I would have made him name her Jenny._

* * *

 

Angel thinks of Jenny in the context that he knows her best: the First wearing her face, eyes gleaming as it tells him to drink from Buffy. He thinks of Jenny as someone malicious and angry and bitter, but in a tired, nonjudgmental way, because he expects only that from the people he killed. He feels that he deserves that spite and hatred from someone like Jenny, someone who had wanted to help. He feels as though his killing her has to have killed that desire, in the end.

He thinks about her, sometimes, remembers that look in her eyes as he killed her. He always interprets it as the realization that Angel—not Angelus—was a monster more than he was a man.

(Not once does he think of her kindness, of the way her eyes lit up when she saw Giles, of the clumsy-sweet way she would attempt to patch the children up after patrol, trying to be motherly but still not quite comfortable in that role. Not once does he think of Jenny’s gratitude for his saving her life, and the way it changed the way she looked at him, and the way she would later plead his case to her uncle. It does not fit into his narrative. He discards it, and forgets.)

* * *

 

Anya thinks about that computer teacher, sometimes. She never knew Calendar, but she could hear her pain; she would have intervened, but there was no vengeance driving a woman like that. Just deep love and cold coffee.


End file.
